You may also want to look at our Textures category, which includes free textures we give away, and links to other texture resources.

The textures are free for personal and commercial use, with no attribution required.

Unlike other texture resources that simply show new textures in a list or preview format, Lost and Taken is a real blog, with RSS feeds, and chronological order of posts. This means that you can subscribe to their RSS feed. Perhaps the only downside is that you cannot view too many textures at once, or look at textures by category (like on previously featured Texturewall).

Lost and Taken was started by photographer (and later self-taught web designer) Caleb Kimbrough – you can read all about how the site was born, on their about page.

Update: Caleb informs that Lost and Taken textures can be viewed in gallery form at Zen Textures, which is also linked from Lost and Taken as the link ‘Gallery’.

An original article by Design Blurb

Lost and Taken: Free, copyright-free stock textures

Related reading:

• Nice Cork Texture – Free Download at stock.xchng
• 20 Free Fabric Textures
• 30 Free Cardboard Textures

Icon Finder has a clean and minimalist design. Thankfully, the site is not stuffed with ads – there are just a couple of private ads and an AdSense unit at the bottom of the site. One can only hope that this lack of advertising does not cause the site to be closed down in future.

Searching for some typical keywords (like computer, camera etc.) turned up relevant results. The accuracy of results would probably depend on the type of keywords used. The quality of results found by search was not amazing, but browsing the icon packs (link to which is on home page) turns up quite a few good icons.

There are a few options to be tweaked while searching for icons – number of icon previews to be listed per page, background color and size of icons.

On clicking through to an icon’s download page, you can see more details about the icon – including name of designer, license, and whether it is part of any icon set (in which case, a link to the icon set is also displayed).

Other sizes and versions of the icon, and other icons from the same icon set are listed after this, so that you can explore further in case the icon in question does not satisfy your needs.

An original article by Design Blurb

Icon Finder: Search for icons by keyword

Texture Lovers: Free texture resource

Texture Lovers is a website dedicated to showcasing free texture resources.

Texture downloads are neatly categorized as single textures (including exlusive textures), texture packs, texture inspiration and tutorials. Textures are further classified – for example, single texture category contains sub-categories like wood, paper, stone and foliage.

Textures on the site are also tagged, so if you liked a particular style, you could click on a tag and continue browsing. Related textures are also displayed at the end of each texture page. The site is well designed and neatly categorized, making lazy texture browsing a breeze. It is also one of the better examples of non-blog sites powered by WordPress. The design, features, categorizing and preview images are worth noting.

Currently, the number of textures cataloged on the site is not huge, but that is understandable since the site was launched only a couple of months ago.

Overall, Texture Lovers is a website worth adding to your collection of texture resources – particularly considering how easy it makes the whole process of finding, previewing and downloading textures.

An original article by Design Blurb

TextureLovers: A source of free texture downloads

Related reading:

• Nice Cork Texture – Free Download at stock.xchng
• Typography Served: Great Source for Inspiration
• Neat Texture Freebies on deviantART

Also tell me through comments whether you like these 3D type art inspiration series of posts – I received some positive feedback in the last two posts, but I would like to know if at least most of you like it.

Make Love

Pablo

Try Type

Coming Through

Collide

Blue

An original article by Design Blurb

Inspirational 3D type art #3

Related reading:

• Inspirational 3D type art
• Inspirational 3D type art #2
• Type Porn

Here is our previous design:

And here is a little preview of the redesign, if you are an RSS/email subscriber, you can click on it to see the real thing.

Now, for some technical details: this design went through three pairs of hands. The design was created by Eli, sliced to xHTML by Niki Liu and converted to a WordPress theme by me.

If you like Design Blurb and the freebies we offer, here is how you can help Design Blurb – please spare a minute to vote for us on Stumble Upon, Delicious and Design Blurb. On posts oriented towards social media, links to those sites are included, so that you can vote easily.

The redesign also sees the introduction of an advertisement area. The revenue from ads will be used to hire graphic design tutorial writers (yes, that means more tutorials+downloadable PSD files!).

As with any other redesign launch, there may be a few loose ends to be tied up. I have been browsing around to find and fix any flaws (and did fix a couple of), but if you find any more, please spare a moment to contact me.

Don’t forget to tell us your suggestions/critique regarding the redesign via comments.

Update: Comment form was broken at launch of the theme, and is now fixed. If you tried to comment and got the error, go ahead and comment now.

An original article by Design Blurb

Design Blurb gets a redesign

Related reading:

• Design Blurb: New Design Resources Blog

Be Happy

Wood

Reality

Helvetica

Envy

An original article by Design Blurb

Inspirational 3D type art #2

Related reading:

• Inspirational 3D type art
• Type Porn
• Unique Type

Design for pleasure

3D text

Lost

Arctic Paper

Green

An original article by Design Blurb

Inspirational 3D type art

Related reading:

• Inspirational 3D type art #2
• Type Porn
• Unique Type

Open Font Library describes itself as “hosting the cream of non-proprietary typeface designs”. You can download, upload and remix available typefaces. Fonts hosted by Open Font Library can also be used by @font-face directive.

Visit Open Font Library

Also see Font Squirrel and Fontex, similar free font websites (although not open typefaces).

An original article by Design Blurb

Free and open font directory: OpenFontLibrary

Related reading:

• Fontex: free fonts directory
• Free iPhone Wallpapers
• 30 Free Cardboard Textures

Fontex has a beautiful design, and neatly categorized fonts, with details and thumbnails of each font. You can also view fonts ordered by best rated, most popular or latest fonts.

Visit Fontex

Also see Font Squirrel (our review), another website which showcases fonts licensed for even commercial usage.

An original article by Design Blurb

Fontex: free fonts directory

Related reading:

• Free and open font directory: OpenFontLibrary
• Sweet Typewriter Fonts for Designers
• Free iPhone Wallpapers

Either way, if you need to create stripes, Stripe Generator is a useful little web app. You can choose stripe size, spacing, style, background and foreground colors, shadow, orientation and tiling. After each modification, you would want to click the preview image to update it (which is AJAX, I think, ie. it does not require page reload).

Once you are done tweaking the options, simply hit Download and you get the stripes. You can also view the latest stripes, clicking on which would load the stripe in the editor. A neat implementation, I must say.

Visit Stripe Generator

An original article by Design Blurb

Create stripes online with free Stripe Generator

Related reading:

• Pixlr: Online Image Editor
• Create and share patterns at BgPatterns
• PatternHead: Free Vector Patterns

Shaun Inman

Shaun Inman invented sIFR (read more about sIFR), so you would expect the best of typography from him, would you not? The bold post title font looks really beautiful in oodles of whitespace.

Jon Tangerine

Jon Tangerine probably has a hatred of images – even his logo is made of pure text!

Ordered List

Ordered List uses image replacements to bring in bold type with subtle shadow (which adds depth).

A List Apart

A List Apart blends in serifs and sans-serifs beautifully, and uses font size to indicate hierarchy.

Jason Santa Maria

Jason’s site has good typography, also check out the variety of designs depending on the article you’re reading.

An Event Apart

Chunky type overlay for images and a liberal sprinkling of serifs for body copy completes An Event Apart, held by some of the members of A List Apart (above).

The Netsetter

Netsetter uses sIFR for post and sidebar titles, and unusually large serif for body copy.

The Deck

Deck is a premium ad network boasting of large corporate clients, and its owner, Jim Coudal, has designed the site with large type that shout its message. Even the logo could be built with type (although it isn’t).

Monday By Noon

Monday By Noon uses sans-serif of varying weight and size, aided by a minimalist design and lots of whitespace.

Omni Ti

Omni Ti uses serifs and sans-serifs in a delightful combination. Also notice the beautiful tagline to the right of the logo – the ampersand in particular.

Gr0w

Gr0w manages to look web 2.0 thanks to the design, but by using classy typography and color variations, it does not look too cheesy.

Geekaholic

Good combination of serifs for body copy and sans-serifs for headers.

Sushi and Robots

(Italic) Georgia looks beautiful when used properly – Sushi and Robots is proof of this.

I realize there maybe some notable omissions – i Love Typography, for example (which is because the new design is less typography-oriented than previous version).

Recommend your favorite designs with excellent type in comments below – if there are several suggestions, I will compile them in a future post here on Design Blurb. I have also added a Twitter profile field to comments here – and comments by users who entered their Twitter URL will have a Twitter bird in their comments, linking to profile.

An original article by Design Blurb

13 websites with inspirational typography

Related reading:

• Typography Served: Great Source for Inspiration
• 14 Awesome Design Resource Websites
• Inspiration: Gallery of iPhone-Optimized Websites

Click on the images below to download them (in full size), or visit the Texture Well site linked at the end for the full package (those guys have lots of useful textures).

Grapevine leaf texture

Ficus texture

Leaf Textures pack [Texture Well]

An original article by Design Blurb

Free veiny leaf textures

Related reading:

• 20 Free Fabric Textures
• 30 Free Cardboard Textures
• Texturise: Free Seamless Textures

Unless you keep up with WordPress upgrades as soon as they are released, the generator meta tag might be an invitation for hackers. There are known security vulnerabilities in older versions of WordPress – its creators recommend simply upgrading in such cases.

If, for some reason, you have to be away from your blog for months on end, it might be a good idea to remove this generator tag. A simple functions.php hack takes care of this. Place the code below, in functions.php file of your WordPress theme:

/* Remove WordPress generator meta tag */
function rmv_generator_filter() {
    return ''; }

add_filter('the_generator', 'rmv_generator_filter');

The code above has two parts – a function that returns nothing (thereby deleting the usual return), and the add_filter function is part of the WordPress API and allows you to add custom functions to create/modify/delete data.

An original article by Design Blurb

Remove WordPress generator meta tag (functions.php hack)

Here are 5 website mascots that are beautiful, convey the purpose of the website and/or serve other purposes. None of these are huge websites, but please suggest your favorite mascots (both offline, corporate mascots and online ones) in comments. Onto the list then:

Kailoon

Kailoon is a freelance designer. His mascot indicates his status of hire – available or busy.

Photoshop Lady

Naldz Graphics

Date JS

James Mathias

The octopus clings on to the content area of the site, introducing some depth in the process.

An original article by Design Blurb

Memorable website mascots

An original article by Design Blurb

Bit o’ Eye Candy (#1)

Related reading:

• Eye Candy: Mesmerizing Curves of Ampersands